


hold the center

by waldorph



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Blanket Permission, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 16:57:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As was so often the case with Jim Kirk, the worst case scenario did not merit contemplation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold the center

**Author's Note:**

  * For [screamlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/gifts).



> So once upon a time I started writing an amnesia fic and then totally forgot about it (I know, the irony). And then screamlet, leupagus and I did yuleterrible, and about a week before we were going to exchange fics screamlet tweeted: _thinking about how i should have asked for amnesia fic for our xmas gift exchange, cackling at your murder eyes_.
> 
> And I did give her murder eyes, but I then revamped and decided to actually start writing this. Huge thanks to leupagus who lets me scream at her helplessly until I work myself into a plot (twice, now, and probably again before this is over).

_“If you can't run, you crawl. If you can't crawl, you find someone to carry you.”  
\- Joss Whedon_

 

“He’s missing,” Sulu said as soon as Spock opened his door. “Word just came through, Uhura—Sir, they can’t find him.”  
   
“What do you mean, they cannot find him? It is a small moon and—“ Spock began, stepping out of his door and locking it behind him. He did not need to ask who it was. There was only one person they all knew who could slip all of the handlers on him.  
   
“I don’t know,” Sulu said. “Chekov and Scotty are already at HQ, we’ve…obtained a lab in Lawson. Uhura was the one who heard it.”  
   
Perhaps once Sulu would have looked at Spock and waited for rebuke, but five years on a ship in the depths of uncharted space with Jim Kirk at the helm have disabused everyone of the idea that Spock is a stickler for Starfleet's regulations. Starfleet’s codes were arbitrary, redundant, and the decisions of its admiralty could not be trusted to be in the best interests of those who sail under their command. If Nyota had been listening in on chatter the way she often did when they were grounded and heard the report, Spock was not going to be the one to reprimand her. Kirk had only ever expected two things of his crew: that they be exceptional, and that they protect each other. Spock might now be captain, but that had not changed.

He also doubted that any of them would have been notified with any haste, something he would be bringing up when he had a conversation with the admirals. Spock should have been notified immediately, perhaps secondary only to McCoy, who was his medical proxy. Spock was his second and his power of attorney (and when Jim was himself, they were the three of them going to sit down and have a long, long conversation about that).  
    
“Is Commander Scott assisting Lieutenant Uhura?” Spock asked as they crossed the green, the fresh crop of cadets scurrying out of their way.  
   
“Yes, sir,” Sulu said, holding the door open to Lawson. "No word yet from the admiralty."

"I am certain you are as unsurprised by that as I," Spock said, as Sulu pushed the door open to the lab.  
   
Nyota was perched on top of the console in her civilian clothes, and at first Spock was confused because Nyota had given no less than eighteen lectures about respecting the equipment one worked with. Then he saw that Scott was curled up underneath the console, wires and a spanner and what looked like important pieces of technology littered around him.  
   
“Anything new?” Sulu asked Chekov, who was in front of a display board.  
   
“I’ve been monitoring the local police—there was a neighbor who reported him missing this morning,” Chekov reported. “According to the hospital, though, he stopped going to his appointments three days ago.”  
   
“It was a bloody microchip!” Scotty shouted from underneath the console, completely outraged. “How did he even know to dig it out of his skin? And for that matter, why was it only a derma implant? We should have buried it in his thick skull.”  
   
“It did not seem prudent to inject a tracking device into a brain injury patient’s skull,” Spock reminded him, standing behind Chekov. They should have known this would happen. It was Jim Kirk, they should have left someone stationed close by. They should have known something would go wrong, because inevitably it always _did._

They had known it, too. He and McCoy sitting in medbay while the _Enterprise_ orbited Cebele IV. They had been exhausted, enduring countless hours of meetings with doctors and specialists and Starfleet brass to discuss the situation. 

"It's a matter of half-triggers," Doctor Chapel had said during one of their consults with her after another battery of tests. "His brain is working to remember, to overcome the block placed on the memories: he knows they're there and is trying to access them but the impulses are getting rerouted, which triggers the emotional response. I don't know, we'll bring in a Vulcan specialist to see if the cultural discipline can be applied or taught just to get him up and running, but. It's not amnesia. Or, it is, but it's not organic amnesia. It was done _to_ him."

"And they can't explain it," McCoy had agreed. "They said something about removing pain and it being a gift and some other shit and—"

"Well, precisely. Even Vulcan melds can go wrong, and, you'll forgive me, Commander Spock, but Vulcans are the most advanced and disciplined psi-sensitive species we've encountered yet. My recommendation is to leave him with us and remove any stimulus that reminds him of who he was."

It had started so innocently, and Spock was not yet convinced it was not still innocent. The Bgh'I had welcomed them, been interested in trade and cultural exchange. Things had gone well, treaties signed, technologies shared. On the last day of their stay the president had shaken the captain's hand, and to Spock it had felt like being caught inside the blast radius of an explosion. He had been rocked back by the force of it, though no one else felt it. No one else in the party was psi-sensitive, though. 

When Spock had regained his equilibrium he had looked to the Captain, who was staring at the president's hand around his in confusion. He lifted his eyes to the president's, and then looked at Spock. 

"Shit," Kirk had exhaled, and then his knees buckled. Spock had been aware of Marcus calling to the _Enterprise_ to beam them up, but he had been preoccupied with feeling for a pulse. Even _touching_ him burned, though it was not a physical burn. He felt like he was being razed to the ground, and had to put his shields up. 

Kirk had awoken, briefly, in the transporter room, staring at Spock with his bright blue eyes. "Don't let me—" he'd begun, and then his eyes had rolled back in his head. Spock had attempted a meld, in spite of the acidic corrosiveness of Jim's mind, and been immediately blown back with an unexpected violence that left him dizzy. 

That had been the last thing Kirk had said to him, to anyone. 

The Bgh'I had been distraught, brought their own doctors in, but they had never seen anything like it before. They opened their medical records, tried to answer all of McCoy's increasingly desperate questions, but in the end the decision had been made to leave. The _Enterprise_ was not equipped to handle Jim Kirk dying a second time, and so they'd come here, to Cebele IV. 

And then Spock and McCoy sat together for hours in the hospital conference rooms, pouring over analysis and read-out, projected prognoses and worst-case scenarios. The whole world had seemed stale and bleached, gritty when viewed through exhausted eyes.

"You are his medical proxy," Spock had pointed out. 

"You've got power of attorney," McCoy had replied, and neither of them had been able to say, I want to keep fighting this. Not when Jim was in the biobed, limned in pale blue-white light and still. Five years was not a long enough time to forget what he had looked like, dead and then comatose. There were things that one never recovered from seeing.

"He could—be functional, here. Even if he never remembered. He's adaptable," McCoy had said. "'Course, he's also allergic to half the universe, and you know as well as I do he's gonna kill himself trying to remember if he keeps getting triggered," McCoy said, scrubbing his hands over his face. "I mean, fuck. You had to pinch him last time, and the only reason nobody died was because phasers default to 'stun.'"

It had been a bad moment. They'd been a week away from the nearest Starfleet Mediship (longer still to reach a planet) and Jim had come out of a medically-induced coma. 

Prior to needing the coma he'd been—excitable. He would wake up and be convinced that he knew them, or knew something of them, but his eyes would slide past them, fists spasming closed. The mental toll had started manifesting in tremors, and then full-body shakes, and then seizures, and all of it built up on itself until he was in a state of hysteria. The coma had been a last-ditch effort until he had woken from it, dazed and fully disoriented. He had still managed to grab a phaser and, body remembering what his mind could not, stunned five security guards and Chekov before Spock had managed to administer the pinch. 

At that point, command of the ship went to Sulu while Spock stayed with Kirk to pinch him into sleep, but every time Spock made contact with him it had hurt, a deep lingering ache. It was like the phantom pain of landing the transporter floor after falling from a great height: your brain knew that it should hurt, and so the impact still resonated along your nerves, even when it failed to occur. He had stayed, though, slept in the biobed next to him, taken his meals with McCoy and meditated, trying to maintain control when all he could feel was Kirk being wrenched away from him.

They had bypassed the Mediship and gone to straight to Cebele IV's hospital.

"I'm going to drink for a month," McCoy warned.

"I know," Spock had replied, and they signed Kirk's life away. They stayed in orbit long enough to sign paperwork, make sure he was established in a quiet suburb when he was ready to reintegrate into society, and then—and then they had walked away, because there had been nothing else to do.

McCoy never got his opportunity to drink himself into a stupor, because Starfleet had wanted debriefings on the five year mission, and the senior staff had been in what seemed to be endless meetings. It was an effective distraction, Spock would admit—it was difficult to wonder about anything not immediately pressing upon him when there had been dozens of meetings and reports and concerned inquiries. 

He had not even seen his father yet. This morning had been the first time he had even contemplated staying at home past 0730, no meeting scheduled until 1300. 

Now he glanced about, noticing for the first time an alarming quiet in the room. “Where is Doctor McCoy?”  
   
“Here, we’re here,” Marcus said as she ran into the room, McCoy behind her. He was lit up with fury and fear, and Spock realized unpleasantly he could sympathize. “Do they know nothing?” Marcus asked, tucking her hair behind her ear, her other hand tugging at the hem of her t-shirt advertising some band. “How can I help?”

"You've got to be kidding me, Chapel!" McCoy was shouting into his comm, slamming his hand against the wall. "You _lost_ a _patient_ and you want me to calm down? I _told_ you he was a flight risk! I goddamn _said_ —"

Marcus turned to look back at him, then looked at Spock and Sulu again, eyebrows raised.  
   
“I just got the transcripts from his psych sessions,” Sulu said, holding up a PADD. “You could help.”  
   
“No,” McCoy snapped, snatching them both away. “Give me those. Jesus fucking Christ, does doctor-patient confidentiality mean nothing? _No,_ not you, Chapel, you keep talking.”  
   
McCoy threw himself down into a chair, hunching over the table and bringing up the data, comm tucked between his ear and shoulder. The sound of his verbal abuse was easy enough to ignore. Spock had, after all, had five years practice.  
   
Spock turned his attention to the reports, sketching out the schedule of Jim's life. It was so odd, for someone who had only reluctantly adhered to a schedule thrust upon him, that Jim would be as regular as clockwork. He went for a run, neighbors reported, between 0800 and 0815. He was at the hospital by 1015, and stayed until 1400. After that he went to physical therapy for a standing 1545 appointment, and was home and stayed there until he woke up to do it all again. It was no wonder the neighbors reported him missing so promptly. 

It was also a wonder it had taken three months for Jim to run. If someone had thought to show Spock this—had shown any of them this, they could have seen it coming. Boredom was never something Kirk had suffered well—monotony even less.

"There are five vessels he could have gotten out on. Only two of them with high probability of taking him," Chekov said, gesturing and highlighting them. "One of them was a trading ship, one of them was a passenger."

"Those are the only ships that left in that week?" Spock asked.

"The only registered ones," Chekov said, making a face. "Is difficult to get an accurate count of the other ones, for obvious reasons."  
   
“Spock, if someone finds him and he doesn’t know who he is and they see through the beard and the plaid—“ Nyota said, cutting herself off sharply.  
   
“I am aware of the repercussions,” Spock told her, because he was. If Starfleet had hoped that Kirk would avoid the mounting tensions along the borders they had grossly underestimated Jim Kirk's ability to attract Klingons and Romulans alike, and along the five years there had been other, new enemies made. Some of them were not to be helped, and some Spock was steadfastly maintaining silence on. If any of them came across Kirk—well. The best they could hope for was for him to be ransomed. As was so often the case with Jim Kirk, the worst case scenario did not merit contemplation.  
   
“Or if he remembered—that’d be even better,” McCoy snarled, arms crossed over his chest. He had, evidently, hung up on Doctor Chapel. “How many fucking boots are on the ground?”  
   
“The nearest Starfleet patrol will be there in fourteen hours,” Sulu said, jaw tight. “They’ve got local law enforcement out already but—well, it’s Captain Kirk. Nobody wants to flash his face on the news if we can help it, because if, like Uhura said, he doesn’t remember who he is and someone finds him—The brass want this handled as quietly as possible, sir,” he said, directing the last bit at Spock.  
   
“Fuck them too,” McCoy said, pinching his nose. "Jesus, we shouldn't have left him there."

"The alternative was insanity," Spock reminded him.

"Fuck," McCoy swore. "Jesus, I hate you."

"Look at the medical records again," Spock told him, ignoring the rest. "See if you can find anything that might indicated we are looking at a scenario in which he remembered."  
   
“If he remembered—“ Marcus said, glancing at McCoy. “It's only—he was on Cebele IV because remembering what little he could was catastrophic. What would happen if he were to fully recover his memories?”  
   
“We don’t know," McCoy said. "And Chapel didn't either. She said that she'd had everyone in, but there was—they didn't know. It might be fine, he might just remember everything and keep right on walking. Or—or it might kill him."  
   
Which was why Jim was on a moon in the middle of nowhere, a full week from the nearest major Federation planet.

"He would have taken the trading ship," McCoy told Chekov after a long silence. "If he'd been—Jim would have taken the transporter. Easy enough to get on, no paperwork, no questions."

And that was the worst of it, the worst part of the entire mess. It was as though Kirk had died, but none of them had the closure of his death. He was gone, absent in a way that was so painfully obvious, even now, standing in a room with no action suggested. Kirk was lost to them, but not gone, and it was that small thread of hope that would wreck them all someday; made it impossible to even consider moving on.

"Then that is where we start," Spock said.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Blanket Permission:** go ahead and translate, make podfic, rework the fic, or do whatever other transformative work you can think of. If the work is hosted on another site, drop me a comment or email and I'll put a link in the story notes!
> 
> [twitter:](https://twitter.com/waldorph) for unfiltered me || [tumblr:](http://waldorph.tumblr.com/) less about me, more about the pretty gifsets and art


End file.
